Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A number of scientific methods have been developed in the medical field to examine physiological conditions of a person, for example, by detecting and/or measuring one or more analytes in a person's body or other environment. The one or more analytes could be any analytes that, when present in or absent from the body, or present at a particular concentration or range of concentrations, may be indicative of a medical condition or health of the person. The one or more analytes could include dissolved gases, body fluids, enzymes, hormones, proteins, cells or other molecules.
Detecting and/or measuring one or more analytes in a person's body or other environment can be accomplished non-invasively. That is, light, sound, electromagnetic waves, or other interrogating energies can be emitted into an environment of interest, and the interaction of elements of the environment of interest with the emitted interrogating energies (e.g., interaction through absorption, reflection, refraction, scattering, fluorescence, transduction, or some other process or combination of processes) can be detected (e.g., by receiving some light, sound, electromagnetic wave, or other energy emitted from the environment of interest in response to the interrogating energy) and used to determine one or more properties of the environment of interest. In some examples, this could include emitting interrogating energies that interact with one or more contrast agents introduced into the environment of interest, e.g., fluorophores configured to selectively interact with a specific analyte in the environment of interest.